Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble personality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming that owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else. His was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet. He felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all he could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of dreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams with their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a cottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights while the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a study as Faustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in his dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their phantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a Messire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait by Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo’s reconstruction, and the old Dijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to keep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered him her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes of the moon.

This is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries:

“LE CLAIR DE LUNE.
“‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormez
Et priez pour les trépassés.’
--_Le cri du crieur de nuit._

“Oh! qu’il est doux, quand l’heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d’or!

“Deux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fenêtre, un chien hurlait dans le carrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer vaticinait tout bas.

“Mais bientôt mon oreille n’interrogea plus qu’un silence profond. Les lépreux étaient rentrés dans leurs chenils, aux coups de Jacquemart qui battait sa femme.

“Le chien avait enfilé une venelle, devant les pertuisanes du guet enrouillé par la pluie et morfondu par la bise.

“Et le grillon s’était endormi, dès que la dernière bluette avait éteint sa dernière lueur dans la cendre de la cheminée.

“Et moi, il me semblait,--tant la fièvre est incohérente,--que la lune, grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!”

“MOONLIGHT.
“‘Wake, men who sleep,
And pray for the dead.’
--_Cry of the night-watchman._

“Oh! how pleasant it is, when the hour trembles in the belfry, at night, to look at the moon, whose nose is shaped like a golden carolus![3]

“Two lepers were complaining under my window, a dog was howling at the cross-ways, and the cricket on my hearth was prophesying in a whisper.

“But soon my ear no longer questioned anything but a profound silence. The lepers had gone back into their kennels, at the sound of Jacquemart beating his wife.[4]

“The dog had fled away up an alley, before the halberds of the watch, rain-soaked, and wind-frozen.

“And the cricket had fallen asleep, as soon as the last spark had put out its last glimmer in the ashes of the fire-place.

“And, as for me, it seemed to me--fever is so incoherent--that the moon, wrinkling her face, put out her tongue at me like a man who has been hanged.”

The moon put out her tongue at her faithful admirer, and helped him neither to honey-dew nor to the milk of Paradise. His biographers do not agree as to the way he lived during his few remaining years. Sainte-Beuve says that he was a private secretary, and that he wrote in various inconspicuous newspapers. M. Séché, to whom we owe a great deal of new information, thinks that these employments are not likely to have held Bertrand for long. About 1835, he found in Eugène Renduel a publisher for _Gaspard de la Nuit_. He sold the right to print an edition of 800 copies, of which 300 were to be called “Keepsake Fantastique,” for the sum of 150 francs. The money was paid and the manuscript was put into the publisher’s desk, where, for some reason or other, it remained for a very long time. Its publication was promised from year to year. In a letter written to David d’Angers, in 1837, Bertrand says: “_Gaspard de la Nuit_, ce livre de mes douces prédilections, où j’ai essayé de créer un nouveau genre de prose, attend le bon vouloir d’Eugène Renduel pour paraître enfin cet automne....” Bertrand did not make the gallant figure in poverty that was made, for example, by Richard Steele, who turned bailiffs into liveried footmen, as Whistler is said to have done more recently; but once, at least, he showed a smiling face to misfortune, even if the smile was a little awry. In 1840, the book being still unpublished, he called on his publisher and left a sonnet on him, as an ordinary person might leave a visiting-card. A more charming protest against procrastination was surely never written:

“Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux,
Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange:
C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange,
Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous.

A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous?
Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange,
Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange;
Nous avons une vigne--eh bien, vendangeons nous!

Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne,
La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne,
Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.

J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes,
A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes.
Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.”

Six months later Bertrand was dead. At least once he had known for several months the inside of a public hospital. He was attacked by phthisis. David d’Angers obtained a grant of 300 francs for him and the promise of a post as librarian; but he was not to leave the hospital again. David, who was himself ill, did all that could be done for him, sent him oranges, and made portraits of him before and after death, and saw to it that his grave-clothes were not of the coarseness deemed fitting for the bodies of the poor. David alone followed his bier, and, no doubt, supplied Sainte-Beuve with the material for his picture (in the introduction to the first edition of _Gaspard de la Nuit_, published in 1842 by Victor Pavie, who bought the rights from Renduel for the sum originally paid):--“It was the eve of Ascension; a terrible storm was rumbling; the Mass for the dead had been spoken, and the funeral procession did not come. The priest had ended by leaving; the only friend present watched the abandoned remains. At the end of the chapel a sister of charity was decorating an altar with garlands for the next day’s feast.”

So ended a life that was like a thread blown in the wind, swung this way and that, without weight, and at last torn from its weak hold and whirled away over the edge of the world. Bertrand’s life was that of the real Bohemian, whose struggle is not the less difficult because his head is high and his eyes, instead of seeing where he is going, are full of magnificent things. Bertrand was like a man trying to speak high poetry when his enemy has him by the throat. He saw, and wrote, and wrestled, in a breath; his achievement was scarcely recognised till he was overthrown. And that achievement, such as it was, that little flame he contrived to light before going out himself, kindled a greater, and in its brighter luminosity almost became invisible. But when we look back from the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ to this little book that suggested their creation, we find that it is not without an independent interest, personal as well as historical. Bertrand himself was somebody, and no book so well as his lets us share the day-dreams of 1830.

1911.

ALPHONSE DAUDET

ALPHONSE DAUDET

Daudet’s was the scintillant, flamelike vitality that makes its possessor the youngest in whatever company he may find himself. Anatole France writes of him that he believes no human creature ever loved nature and art with a more ardent and more generous affection, or enjoyed the universe with more delight, more force, and more tenderness. Even in old age and suffering, he brought merriment with him when he limped into the big room that Edmond de Goncourt called his “grenier,” and kept for talk and friendship. If the room had been sad or silent, it woke to laughter when this invalid came in and began to speak. Men felt themselves more alive in his presence. This vitality is different from the physical and mental momentum of a Balzac. It is a lambent flame rather than a conflagration; light without heat. It scorched no one, not even Daudet himself, who made it into a public entertainer. He could use it at will; it did not impel him into a restless activity. I can imagine that indolent people felt ill at ease with Balzac in the room, as if from a fear that he might go off like a dynamite bomb. Daudet’s vitality was gentle, and insinuated itself into his listeners’ veins, so that when they left they had the pleasant sensation of having themselves been more than usually vivacious. “I have missed my vocation,” he said; “I should have been a merchant of happiness.” It was a vocation that he had not missed. A merchant of happiness was precisely what he was, since one kind of happiness is a childish enjoyment of everything that may occur. Children run about all day, without forethought, and play at being all sorts of things, and chatter and fall asleep, still chattering, in the middle of a sentence. They wake next morning to perform a variation ever so blithe on yesterday’s performance. Daudet lived just so, and was able to share his life with other people.

_Le Petit Chose_ is the story of his childhood. It is the tale of a little boy whose father is an unsuccessful man of business, a little boy with a parrot and a dream of Robinson Crusoe, who is transplanted from his south to a northern manufacturing town, a child who becomes an usher in a school where his youth and his poverty make him butt of boys and masters alike, where he writes love-letters for a gymnastic instructor, and suffers in his stead for their success, a child who goes to Paris at seventeen to join his brother in poverty and hope, and to write a poem about blue butterflies. The book is almost true to history, except that, unlike Daudet, _le Petit Chose_ ends as partner in a china shop, regretfully resigning his blue butterflies to marry the daughter of the china shop’s proprietor. The real tale of his shyness and pathetic adventures, that Daudet was never tired of telling, since it was his own, goes on in other books. There is in them all a _joie d’écrire_ as much as _joie de vivre_. He rejoices in every misfortune of his childhood, because, in describing it, he finds an opportunity for life as a young man. His life as a child had been told to himself as a fairy tale. He had told ingenious lies to excuse his truant days on the river, killing off a Pope to hide, in his family’s excitement, his lateness for a meal. He told lies to himself to excuse the sordid appearances of his existence, and now he had a chance of telling lies again, and so living another romance. Daudet’s writing was always a means of living for him. His own life could be multiplied indefinitely by the glosses he put upon it. He is not, like Coppée, a disillusioned man remembering dreams, paining himself with the memory of the boy he was. Daudet, far from envying that boy of whom he writes, seems to be still identical with him, and tells his escapades as if they were yesterday’s, as indeed they might be. Even when he tries to write disillusioned novels, he sits in a rosy cloud, and is irrepressibly happy in spite of them. He never knows whether pain or pleasure is the more enjoyable. Either is an aid to living, and perhaps the former gives life a keener taste.

Men of this kind do not spend their vitality altogether for nothing. More than others they need affection and applause. A face of disapproval in their audience is enough to wither their wings, and they ask for goodwill, if only to help them to continue the performance. _Le Petit Chose_, like most of Daudet’s work, like his life, and his other representations of his life, conversational or on paper, is an appeal to be loved. He asks to be seen as he sees himself, and asks very successfully. It is this, I think, that makes it easy to forgive him his sins against pure art; this that accounts for his friends’ love of him, and also for the popular success that made him feel a little uncomfortable among them. His greed of affection made him not very fastidious; he was glad to be loved by his baker as well as by Edmond de Goncourt.

Daudet acquired the habit of being lovable. He made his own life into a fairy tale, and, since it was the surest way to gratitude, soon found it difficult to see the lives of others in any different way. He copied his men and women from nature, as he said, but each one of them readily became _le Petit Chose_, and he his affectionate, rose-spectacled biographer. When his novels are laid aside, and we look at their backs, we forget their extraordinary observation, and see characters exaggerated by a man who is anxious to persuade; and when these characters have faded away into framed drawings like those taken from back numbers of _Punch_, we remember little of the books but a spirit that asks love and gives it, is ready to understand more than there is to be understood, and to make excuses for those who are without them. We think of Daudet as the tenderest possible biographer for ourselves, and at the same time feel a little shrinking from the idea of being exhibited with such emphasis. Some of the novels, with which we are not here particularly concerned, do their best to dispel the atmosphere of rose-leaves and sunshine, involving us in a swift and keen analysis of unkind and unpleasant motives. But when we close even these, little is left of them but their author’s charm, and the memory of those incidents or descriptions, in which, freed from the burden of an ambitious task, he loosens the bridle of his romancing vitality.

His books are not so consistent as his character. They are always most satisfactory when most directly concerned with it. This is partly because he wrote of himself in anecdotes, and his inspiration was facile and short-winded rather than persevering. The effects he secures in his writings are the same as those he won in conversation, snatches of colour and feeling, like the studies in an artist’s notebook, often better than when repainted into pictures. Ambition perhaps obstructed his talent in setting it to do other men’s work, however well he may have been able to do it. He was not a novelist, although he made himself one. His big books, in which he describes many lives and kinds of life, are already being sieved out by time, and the work by which his name will be remembered is reducing itself to his real and imaginary reminiscences and his short stories. In these he does not mingle contradictory ingredients; while his novels, even the best, are too much like battle-grounds between Queen Mab and Zola.

In his short stories he is perfectly at ease. His talent was no eagle for long flights, but one of his own blue butterflies. It flew far only with effort, and tired as it flew, drooping its wings or flapping them irregularly. But in the short tales no flight was so long as to tire it. It was happy and at ease, opened its wings with grace, and as it dropped, folded them with all imaginable delicacy. In the _Contes du Lundi_ he reconciled his powers and his ambition. He was a romancer, a _conteur_, a _causeur_, and romantic anecdotes refuse to be fettered to a strict and steady veracity. He wished to be a painter after nature, to be accurate, to be real, to be mistaken for reality. There are moments, but only moments, when the two kinds of truth, that these powers and this ambition severally suggest, coalesce in a truth that is charming and, at the same time, almost photographic. In the novels the truth disintegrated into opposing masses. In short stories he was able to combine them. His brief, flashing sketches, with their curious air of stereoscopic perspective, are seldom in the least unreal. Yet, poignant little things, unforgettable, however slight, they are not the probabilities of life but its possibilities. They are the lies that ought to be true. The story of the Alsatian schoolmaster, or that of the siege of Berlin, with the old colonel, in his worn uniform, standing on the balcony to welcome the victorious French, and seeing instead the Uhlans of the advance guard, and hearing the triumphal march of Schubert, as the Prussians enter Paris; all these minute things are too dramatic, too pathetic, not to be allowed their moment of existence. Daudet writes them, and they bring tears to our eyes, tears that, unfortunately, we must submit to a rather cruel analysis.

Tears, and also laughter. Daudet with his firm belief in the ultimate victory of all good and pleasant people, and the corresponding punishment of the bad and unkind, enjoyed, like many happy-minded men, a highly developed faculty of pity. It was one of his means of being alive, and this man, who “died of having loved life too well,” neglected none of the exercises that made his nerves tingle and his heart beat. He lived in being sorry for people and things, and he lived in being glad. Another group of his short stories is made up of pure fairy tales that dance before the eyes, their words running and tripping after each other, like a band of elves on midsummer’s eve. They are southern tales of old Provence that he read in the grasshopper’s library under the blue sky, where the librarians sing all day, and there are gossamers for bookmarks. Their heartsome feeling is that of the old song:

“Sur le pont d’Avignon
Tout le monde danse en rond.”

Even when he brings the elves to town, as in _Un Réveillon dans le Marais_, when, into the old courtyard of the mansion that has been turned into a mineral water factory, he introduces cavaliers and ladies of the ancient time, fairies now, being dead so long, he brings with them half a memory of the farandole, and makes them drunk with seltzer.

Laughter and tears; it is by these that we remember Daudet. His art is that of wearing his heart on his sleeve. “Here,” he seems to say, “is a sad tale to make you cry (I cried myself in making it), and here is a merry one to make you laugh (my pen quivered with merriment as I wrote it down for you).” Laughter and tears tempted him perhaps too strongly. He was accustomed to tell his stories many times before he wrote them. They shaped themselves, like folktales, in successive recitations, until the inessentials fell away from them and they won economical and immediate effects. The danger of such a manner of composition is a confusion of ends. The only safe audience for a writer is that undiscoverable and absolute judge, who, from his niche in our consciousness, signs now and again his knowledge that such and such an expression is truly expressed, is really expression and not an incomplete and muffling mask. That other audience, whose lips open, whose eyes smile or weep as we read to them, is not a judge of art. Its values are not aesthetic. Its most obvious criticisms are those of laughter and tears, and these are written too clearly not to become more important to us than they should. How can the jocund tale be bad that made you laugh? How can that sad one fail that sent your kerchief to your eyes? There may be imperfections in them; yes, but by removing them, I must be careful not to lose that laughter or those tears. And so, almost inevitably, the tears and laughter come to seem the ends of art instead of its by-products. And they are not the wistful tears that dew the eyelashes before a perfect work, nor the impersonal laughter that rings out like a spring song because some man has made a new thing well for the eternal gods to see.

Most Frenchmen are performers; and the Frenchman from the south is he who wins the greatest joy from his performance. I remember a big bare studio in the Boulevard Vaugirard, where a crowd of students, poets, sculptors, painters, and their women, used to be merry together and drink coffee (if there was coke for the stove), and eat Olibet biscuits (if there was money to buy them). Among us were two curly-headed Provençals, whose voices had a more persuasive abandon than ours to whatever they wished to say. There was a balcony in the studio with a ladder fastened to it, so that the artist might climb to his bed. One of the Provençals used to stand up, leaning on the ladder, and sing us old songs of his country, while his friend sat on the lower steps and dropped the deeper notes of a silver flute into their proper places in the melody. The songs were sometimes joyful, sometimes sad. More than once, when some pathetic tune or words made his audience weep, I have seen the flute-player, unable to restrain his happiness, caper about the studio with his instrument. Something of Daudet was in the flute-player and something of the flute-player in Daudet.

1909.

THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE

THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE

Some writers seem to represent single moods of life. Most men grow from childhood to old age, passing from illusion to disillusion (in which illusion does no more than turn its coat), then to resignation (a kind of agnostic attitude towards their own sensations), and, finally, perhaps, end in the most obstinate illusion of all. But there are writers who seem to stop at this or that point in the road, to take up their stand there, and to date from that resting-place all the monologues that they allow humanity to overhear. The work of the greatest artists is sent off from every post-office on the journey, or, if their work is done in age, it holds proof that they have travelled all the way. Coppée hesitates on the brow of that hill from which can be seen for the last time the sunlit country of youth. Already disillusioned, he looks back, and spends his life in regretting the past. All his work has a retrospective glamour, and where he writes joyously of the present, it is easy to feel that the joy is a religious joy, and that his work is a memorial rite, re-enacting something that has long since faded away.

He took this attitude when very young. There are, indeed, men whose eyes have always been turned back, men whose earliest memory is a regret for the memory earlier still that they have lost. In the prologue to _Le Reliquaire_, published in 1866, he wrote:

“Et de même que, tous les soirs,
Ils font autour du reliquaire
Fumer les légers encensoirs.
Dédaignant le douleur vulgaire
Qui pousse des cris importuns,
Dans ces poèmes je veux faire
A tous mes beaux rêves défunts,
A toutes mes chères reliques,
Une chapelle de parfums
Et de cierges mélancoliques.”

In building for his fair dead dreams a chapel of sad perfumes and melancholy candles, he spent the better part of his life. His prose was written later than his verse, but years did not alter the object of his architecture.

He was sometimes assailed by other moods, but did not allow himself to yield to them. He had succeeded young; it is possible that having charmed already, he was half afraid of losing by any change the odour and the essence impossible to analyse, in which he knew that he could trust, and which, once at any rate, had been personal to himself. There remain, however, the indications of occasional faith in mutability. Sometimes he flung himself boldly in the direction whither life would have taken him. But the feeling of boldness, of experiment, that pervades, for example, _Le Coupable_, is enough to show that he was ill at ease. The story is that of a man who leaves his mistress, a Parisian grisette. She has a child, who, born in the gutter, grows up among the vicious and finds his way to a penitentiary, and, at last, committing a serious crime, is brought for judgment before his father. The father, learning his identity, tells the whole story, and asks whether he himself, rather than his son, is not the true _coupable_. Coppée finds in it an opportunity for a study of society from below, for much close and accurate description, and for a very searching account of the reformatory system. It is a clever book, but somehow Coppée has dropped out of it.

I do not mean that all Coppée’s best work is to be known by an atmosphere of sentimental yearning for the past. His mood is much more delicate. He writes as a man whose illusions are gone, but he does not often cry aloud,

“Hélas! les beaux jours sont finis.”

He only says that there have been fine days. By fine days he means days of enthusiasm and of a simple heart. He has once walked with the world far below his feet; but, now that its wisdom has risen over his head, he cannot recover that old enthusiasm by pretending to be ignorant. Knowing too much, his only care is to preserve as a touchstone the memory of his lost unwisdom. He does not often more directly express his regret. But it is a recognition of his regretfulness that makes his stories bitter to the very young, half-conscious of their youth, and pained by all that helps to waken them to simultaneous knowledge and loss of it.

In _Toute une Jeunesse_ he confesses that his hero, “personnage imaginaire dans une action imaginaire, sent la vie comme je la sentais quand j’étais un enfant, et quand j’étais un jeune homme.” Much of the imaginary action follows very closely the course of his own life, and it is possible in reading it to watch the fine days and then the gradual realisation that they had been fine. Amédée Violette, born in a little flat in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, behind the gardens of the Luxembourg, the son of a government clerk, loses his mother very young, and grows up in loneliness, except for the little girls next door. He goes to school in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, turning out of the other. There is a plane-tree in the schoolyard, which allows the schoolmaster to offer a garden on his prospectus. The assistant masters are grotesque and wretched. The head of the principal is like the terrestrial globe that stands on the desk in his study to impress his pupils’ parents. Amédée grows up, spending fine evenings in long walks through Paris with his father, the widower, who takes gradually to absinthe for the sake of forgetfulness. He grows up in the quarter, studies at the university, solitary in the midst of its gregarious frivolity, partly from poverty, partly from love of the child with whom he used to play. He leaves the university with a degree, and is taken on in the same office as his father, as a supernumerary clerk. So many hours a day disappear from his life, and he wakens only in the evenings, which he spends in rhyming, and on Sundays when he writes all day without leaving his room. He has a few friends who count him almost a hermit. A young actor takes him to the Café de Séville in the Boulevard Montmartre, where he introduces him to Paul Sillery, a poet and editor of an unpopular review--Catulle Mendès, perhaps. The café is full of men with beards, politicians, and men with hair, poets. Sillery recognises a poet in him, and when the actor recites one of his poems with success at a charity performance in a theatre, sends him to a publisher--no doubt Lemerre, who published the Parnassians. His first volume is printed and successful. He has come so far when his youth is taken from him. His nearest friend betrays him, and he has to compel him to marry the girl he has so long loved himself. He passes through various more or less empty adventures. The Franco-Prussian war leaves the girl a widow with a boy, and his friend’s last wish is that they should marry. The wish is fulfilled: Amédée, married to a woman he has loved from childhood, has a wife whose heart is buried with his friend. It is all so different from its promises. The poet is left with the consolation of his art, and the book ends: “Hélas! ta jeunesse est finie, pauvre sentimental! Les feuilles tombent! Les feuilles tombent!”

The leaves fall on the paper as Coppée writes. It is always autumn in his books, because he is always thinking of spring. But _Toute une Jeunesse_ lets us into more of his secrets than this. It is full of love for Paris, and obsessed by the contrast between rich and poor, or rather between appearances and the other appearances they hide. Life is very much like one of those Japanese nests of coloured boxes; you open the little round scarlet wooden cylinder, and there is a green one inside. You open that and find a blue. Within the blue is a scarlet one again. It is so with life. No state of disillusionment is final. There is always another behind it which will turn what seemed to be an unemotional acceptance of life as it is into a regretted and fantastic dream. Coppée is less conscious of the infinite endurance of mutability than of his regret for particular yesterdays. He must put all he writes of in the scarlet box. Paris for him is always the Paris of 1866. He felt, he said, like Madame de Staël, “la nostalgie de son cher ruisseau de la rue du Bac,” but the gutter he yearned for flowed in the days when he was young. It is this that gives some of his work an appeal that has nothing to do with its merit. For there are many to whom Paris represents the days when they were young, many to whom the names tune the pulses to a quick and joyous march, names like the rue Notre Dame des Champs, twisting grey street, whose pavements still beat with the airy tread of new generations of dreamers. It is the same throughout. When he talks of buying books at the Odéon, we do not watch an old man choosing what he wishes, and paying for it from a pocketful of money that he has not counted. We see the Coppée of 1864, or ourselves of ten years ago; boys, with the price of the book, and perhaps ten sous for dinner, spending nevertheless an hour in looking at all the other books on the stalls, and then buying the one for which we had come with the swift manner of those who have walked straight to the bookshop, and, having got what they want as expeditiously as possible, are going straight off again. We see that dead Coppée, or ourselves, sitting among the nurse-maids in the gardens opposite, cutting the leaves with a clasp-knife from a fair. The Café de Seville, once a meeting-place for men of beards and men of hair, is made a tryst for Coppée and his dead youth. And when he says that for the Parisian the seasons come to town, and that, in a green and rose sunset, he can find the autumn’s morbid melancholy, and, in a sunny morning in the Luxembourg gardens, all the divine joyousness of spring, we know of what Parisian he is speaking.

His obsession by the contrast between rich and poor reduces to the same sentiment. He does not hate the rich because they are rich; he is only sorry for them if money has taken away from them something they might have had in poverty. He is not sorry for the poor because they are poor, but only if their poverty expresses the lack of something that, with money, they think they might have had. He has come to regard illusions as the only sterling coin. In the two contrasted tales of “The Italian Organ” he seems to weigh rich and poor in opposite scales, and to find a balance between them. One tune of the organ reminds a poor clerk’s wife of the days before she married, when she was the prettiest girl at the cheap dances, and Monsieur Fred, amusing himself, filled her head with dreams. Riches have carried him away from her, and she has grown paler, and married Jules with the stiff collar and the india-rubber-cleaned gloves. It is very sad. Another tune reminds the Countess of the days before she married, when as la Belle Adah of the American Circus, she reigned in her own place. The Count fell in love with her, pursued her, married her, and trained her to be a lady. She spends her mornings in visiting institutions, and there is a vicar waiting on her in the drawing-room. It is very sad. But the sorrow of both these women is not for their riches or their poverty. It is mourning for a life that can never be lived. Coppée’s love for the poor is unlike Daudet’s. Daudet loves the poor because they are brave and picturesque. Coppée sees in them the simpleness of heart and the power of dreaming that were his when he was poor himself, that is to say, when he was young. The poor invented Christianity.

Very little happens in Coppée’s short stories. In some of them nothing happens at all. Things are remembered and set down, and from those notes rises less a tale than the suggestion of a story that might have been told. Now it is old Mother Bernu, who saw Marie Antoinette carried to the guillotine in a white shirt, and is thrown up by a careless Time to take the little Coppée out for walks. Now it is a couple of old bachelors talking of might-have-beens. Now, “Mon Ami Meurtrier,” a swaggering athletic clerk, is discovered to be the mildest of men, attending to his mother’s lap-dog, and mixing good coffee. In most of the stories it is more than usually evident that the author is the real hero. “The White Frock” is the tale of a lame child whose only white dress is worn at her first communion. All her friends wear a second on their wedding days, and she will never be married. It is really the tale of a man who passes daily through a little street, and, in watching the street change, beards whiten, and children marry, sees his own youth passing from him, and, in the little lame girl, a melancholy piece of childhood’s jetsam whose dream will never be realised, never be destroyed. There was a little boy who lived near the gardens of the Luxembourg, and walked there in the spring, when the trees were caught in a net of fluttering green, and in the summer heat, when those long walks were patterned black and white with sun-thrown shadows, and in the autumn, when the leaves were rusty gold, and fell to the ground to make a pleasant trampling place for children’s feet, and in the winter, when, over the round steel pond, the grey stone Queens of France looked mournfully at the straight-fronted palace. He walked there, intimate with all the moods of the garden, his eyes awake with possibilities, rhyming verses that perhaps would never be published, and finding the world a fairy-tale with so many ends from which to choose that it was fortunate it would not finish soon. He was always alone there, in the midst of the students, girls and nurse-maids. He and the sparrows seemed to have the garden to themselves. The others did not seem to matter. And this boy never left the study of François Coppée. If Coppée looked up from his desk he was there, almost reproachful, a ghostly boy with clear and truthful eyes, walking under the trees, in ragged clothes, rhyming verses for himself. The wisdom of the world turned to dross beside his golden ignorance, and the man who had grown up felt, like the loiterer along the quays, a continuous pride and pain in thinking of the days when the sunset had shone for him alone.

1909.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

AN ESSAY IN COMPREHENSION

_To I. C. R._

Philosophy in the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the tremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of dialectic. A philosopher’s pride is in the impersonal nature of his thought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery, on which the maker’s name is the only sign that it was once a daring, personal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of the body of a man. Its maker, when it is finished, would wish to wipe the filings and the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste, and, folding his arms, to watch it in independent activity. The reason of this ambition is to be found neither in modesty, nor yet in vanity, but in a ruling intellectual concept, the concept of absolute truth. If the true is universally true, if a thing either _is_, or _is not_, then the personality of the thinker either is grit in the wheels, or, by the necessity of its presence and assistance, betrays the weakness of the thought whose truth or untruth can in no way be affected by the existence or non-existence of its discoverer. This Nietzsche resolutely denied, and denied in two ways.

First, he denied the absolute nature of truth, asserting that the word “true” was merely a title given by men to opinions, and that the justice of its application was, in a broad sense, to be judged pragmatically. A pragmatist before William James, he said: “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us; that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life.”[5]

Secondly, he denied that the personality of the thinker was a disturbing factor in his thought. It was, on the contrary, the guarantee that once at least that thought had been true. “Now philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders; to all later philosophers they are usually a single big mistake, and to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths.... Therefore many disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs.... Whoever, on the contrary, finds any pleasure at all in great men finds pleasure also in all such systems, be they ever so erroneous, for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal touch and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the philosopher, just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can form conclusions as to the soil. _That_ mode of life, of viewing human affairs at any rate, has existed once, and is therefore possible.” He wrote that quite early in his career in his little book on early Greek philosophy, a history like the dawn setting on fire the tips of the distant mountains, then the nearer, and at last throwing on the ground behind him the shadow of the observer. For Nietzsche, the mountain peaks are those fragments of the crumbled systems which are personal to their authors, and, even if refutable as philosophy are irrefutable as particular and individual revelations. It is a delightful little gathering of philosophers and, perhaps, more important than has yet been admitted, in its promise of Nietzsche’s habit of thought, his impatience of dialectic, his dislike of the Parmenidean mind, his trust in the poetic, the particular. “What verse is to the poet,” he says, “dialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.” From this view he never departed. In _Beyond Good and Evil_ he repeats his belief in the personal character of thought: “In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable ‘I am this’; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully--he can only follow to the end what is ‘fixed’ about them in himself.” And again in _Zarathustra_: “‘This is now my way--where is yours?’ Thus did I answer those who asked me ‘the way.’ For _the_ way--it doth not exist.”

And so, for Nietzsche, truth is infinitely variable, minted afresh by each man and dependent upon his image and superscription for a guarantee of its particular validity. It was for this reason that he despised the elaborate stage-play of reasoning. He believed that to exhibit ideas in a white light and at a mean temperature, when they offered themselves in the glow of the morning or in the heat of noon, was to strip them of their credentials. He insisted that his own thoughts were true in relation to himself, and preserved their concreteness by way of preserving the conditions of their truth. He refused the step from the concrete to the abstract as a step into annihilation, and in this way identified himself with the poets. To misunderstand him here is to misread him everywhere.

We are examining, then, in Friedrich Nietzsche a man whose view of truth demanded the personal presence of the thinker as guarantee of the thought. Consequently, though for reasons I have already given it is usual on the part of philosophers and their critics to rule the personality of a thinker out of a discussion of his thought, here, at least, we are justified in glancing at a man’s character before we examine the ideas that will help us to fill it out to approximate verisimilitude.

Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, went mad in January 1889, and died on August 25, 1900. His father was a country parson, simple, upright, patriotic and monarchical. He found joy in the coincidence of his son’s birthday with that of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and this circumstance gave Nietzsche his names. His mother was a young woman of high spirits and great physical energy, so exuberant and so lovable as to be described as “a gorgeous savage” by her mother-in-law. His father, “preordained to pay only a flying visit--a gracious reminder of life rather than life itself,” died in his six and thirtieth year, before Nietzsche was five. A grandmother, two aunts and his mother presided over a pious happy childhood, from which he emerged as a model schoolboy, laughably virtuous, walking slowly home in a rainstorm in spite of his mother’s frenzied urging, and rebuking this urging with pained austerity: “But, mamma, in the rules of the school it is written, ‘On leaving school boys are forbidden to jump and run about in the streets, but must walk quietly and decorously to their homes.’” This sedateness persisted with him, although he could so completely forget himself in playing with children, that when he was twenty-six and a professor, he was laughed at and told he was only fourteen. He always dressed with notable nicety. Though he said, with pride, that he would rather be a satyr than a saint, he had a dignity that belongs rather to holiness than to lust. Children and old women loved him. The fruit-sellers in the Turin market-place hurried to pick out for him their finest grapes. He had gentle manners, a beautiful voice, and a profound sense of the politeness that an aristocrat owes to himself. He clung to the legend that he was the descendant of Polish noblemen, and was proud of being mistaken by Poles for a Pole, that Frenchman among the Slavs. His favourite books were the courteous unruffled French moralists of the seventeenth century, and the works of Stendhal, who resembled them in wearing a sword and in his love of fine manners.

His precarious health gave him extreme sensitiveness to his physical condition. He believed that clear thinking was only possible in dry air and on hills. His highest praise for his work was that it was mountain thought. He composed in the open air and in motion, and advised other people to follow his example. “Remain seated as little as possible, put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion--nor in one in which even the muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in the intestines.”

He seized on Flaubert’s “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis,” with a cry: “Here have I got you, you nihilist? A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.”

He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that “apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was detrimental to him, “as the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.” A healthy man, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses “the will to health,” and “is strong enough to make everything turn to his own advantage.” He found in convalescence “a pale delicate light and a sunshine happiness,” “a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect, and haughtiness.” From the combination of his ill-health and his healthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche learnt, he says, “to look upon healthier concepts and values from the standpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret work of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is laden and rich with the richness of life.” He mentions “the sweetness and spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of blood and muscle,” and remembers the unusual dialectical clearness he enjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious than most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain. When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of Silvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition of this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added the exultant postscript: “6000 feet beyond man and time!”

Such, sketched as briefly as possible, is the physiological background on which we must set his work.

The greater part of that work (which fills seventeen volumes in the English translation) is made up of short numbered paragraphs, arranged under general headings. The lectures and poems are, indeed, the only exceptions, for though _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays called _Thoughts out of Season_, are less disintegrated than later books, we can perceive, in their numbered sections, the promise of sections shorter and continually shortening to the brief “Maxims and Missiles” at the beginning of _The Twilight of the Idols_. Even _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ was built in a similar manner, though disguised by the rush of prophecy and a more definite general scheme. Nietzsche allowed such constructive power as he had to atrophy. He was never a systematic thinker, but, because his paragraphs are not such separate and individual observations like those of Chamfort or Vauvenargues; because they were often written in swift succession, one after another, there is a dangerous possibility that in reading them we may feel we are reading notes for a book which the author has not troubled to piece together into the superficial form to which we are accustomed. We may resent this, but we are more likely to grow weary of the constant change of subject, of the staccato iteration of ideas without prologues or epilogues to awaken slowly and lull again to repose our sluggish brains. It is well to remember that we have learnt to read too fast, and that Nietzsche foresaw our discomfort. “He that writeth in blood doth not want to be read but learnt by heart.... It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood. I hate the reading idlers.” We cease to feel the superficial confusion and inconsistency of those ten thousand paragraphs when we become better aware of the half-dozen ideas that were the parents of that numerous family. We are then able to trace a paragraph’s pedigree, and to place it in a larger scheme than that of the volume in which it happens to be printed. No reader of Nietzsche can have failed to notice that his books, different in detail, different in application, yet often seem coincident with each other. Nor is this due to chance repetitions that would betray an uncritical improvisation. It is an accurate indication of Nietzsche’s habit of mind. His books were gleanings, and, after his mature work began, they were gleanings from fields almost uniformly sown. The seasons varied and the sower’s arm was irregular in its swing, but the harvest was always from a field that had been fertilised by a fairly uniform mixture of ideas. The ideas of the pragmatic nature of truth, of Eternal Recurrence, of the Will to Power, of the Superman, and of master and servant morality, yield in book after book a new crop of lesser ideas, applied, amplified, restricted or illustrated in psychological observation. For this reason I do not intend, in what can but be a short essay, any detailed criticism of Nietzsche’s books, but rather to note the results of such criticism. The reading of his books, unless it be impatient, careless, and unworthy, is a process of discovering what were those half-dozen ideas that separated Nietzsche from the thinkers of his time, stimulated his brain until at last it broke, and during many years kept him in the lonely joyful ecstasy of continual exploration.

“The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it,” but they often so obscure it as to postpone its eventual utility. Some of the half-dozen ideas I have mentioned have been so often caricatured that it is extremely difficult to recognise them without the exaggeration with which we have been made familiar. It is not easy to state another man’s ideas. To fail is to do him an injury. To succeed is not unlike taking the words out of his mouth, which is rude. But I am neither a translator of Nietzsche nor an opponent. I wish to understand, not to persuade. And, for understanding, such statement is desirable.

Nietzsche neither escapes nor attempts to escape the contradictions in the form of thought that make logic and life battledores to toss laughter at each other like a shuttlecock. He is a determinist and yet gives advice, the giving of which presupposes a belief in free will and a possible choice. He seeks to influence others, and, in his manner at least, forgets that the logical determinist should only allow himself to say: “Circumstances compel me to make certain statements, which, in the form of circumstances, may or may not share in the sum of circumstances that compel you to actions and thoughts which in their totality I cannot conceive.” That is not the view of his own activity which dictates the eager vivid combination of argument and incantation that makes Nietzsche’s books. He is free, in that he has the illusion of freedom. The illusion of freedom is one of the determining circumstances. Its effect is to make it unnecessary to remember in practice that circumstances determine.

We need not therefore hesitate over the inconsistency apparent between some of Nietzsche’s ideas. We do better to notice it as characteristic of his thought, and simply to state his ideas, remembering, if we will, that they belong to different circles of consciousness; some to that wider circle that includes the universe and with it determinism, and some to that smaller circle, concentric with the first, and including only the area of practical activity. Let us be determinists first and examine the Nietzschean universe.